Volume 1, Issue 1,
November 2007

The Department of Transport and Supply Chain Management at the University of Johannesburg is proud to bring you this first edition of the Journal of Transport and Supply Chain Management.

The Journal serves as an independent publication for scientific contributions in the field of transportation and supply chain management, i.e. logistics, operations management, purchasing management, distribution management, warehousing management, transportation (all modes), production planning and related fields. Theoretical, empirical and applied articles are considered for publication. It is the challenge of the Journal to present a diverse range of articles covering a variety of subject matter within the arena of transport and supply chain management.

Integrated supply chain risk management (ISCRM) has become indispensable to the theory and practice of supply chain management. The economic and political realities of the modern world require not only a different approach to supply chain management, but also bold steps to secure supply chain performance and sustainable wealth creation.

Integrated supply chain risk management provides supply chain organisations with a level of insight into their supply chains yet to be achieved. If correctly applied, this process may optimise management decision-making and assist in the protection and enhancement of shareholder value.

In product development close collaboration between systems integrators and suppliers is important. The purpose of this article is to investigate the impact of the work breakdown structure (WBS) and work packages (WPs) in product development on the possibility of carrying through the strategy of supplier involvement into collaborative practice and to investigate how supplier involvement can be improved by altering the design of collaborative WBS and WP structures. Dependence Structure Matrix (DSM) is introduced in order to analyse, visualise and manage interdependencies, in terms of information exchange between the systems integrator and supplier. This article shows how DSM can support the alternative design of integrated and collaborative WBS and integrated WPs following the logic of dependencies and the flow of information in order to support a strategy focusing on integration of suppliers on project and team level.

The way companies manage and integrate their business operations is undergoing various dramatic changes. Businesses are competing globally, and traditional barriers between industries are breaking down. One way of coping with the rapidly changing marketplace, remaining competitive and achieving superior performance, is for business leaders to move towards new business paradigms that allow their companies to work more closely together with their traditional and new business partners (including all clients and suppliers up and down the supply chain). The objective of this article is to document the players and processes of the current South African recording industry, and to consider a supply chain model where all non-core business activities are outsourced to an integrated third-party supply chain management partner.

The progress of the South African economy relies heavily on earnings from physical exports, which depend increasingly on the competitiveness in global markets of the maritime supply chains that serve the country. World best practice requires that those chains should function as entities structured to serve their logistical purpose, while the development of such structured chains requires chain leadership.

Transnet fulfils a prominent role in South Africa's maritime supply chains, but that role, in accordance with the declared policy of the Government, constitutes an impediment to restructuring the chains as competing entities under private leadership. The solution may be found in leadership by public-private partnerships.

The logistics industry has been attracting the attention of researchers in management for several years. Their focus is increasingly on interorganisational relationships between logistics service providers and their customers, examining the modes of interaction occurring between them. An abundant literature emphasises the importance of cooperative strategies in the logistics industry, hinting that this is a dominant requirement, destined for inevitable development. This article presents a more qualified position and proposes that cooperative strategies are most likely a transition step between arm's-length competition periods, and resorts to the entrenchment theory, imported from organisational finance, to propose a sequential cooperation-competition model.